Show Boat is a 221-minute studio album of Jerome Kern's musical, performed by a cast headed by Karla Burns, Jerry Hadley, Bruce Hubbard, Frederica von Stade and Teresa Stratas with the Ambrosian Chorus and the London Sinfonietta under the direction of John McGlinn. It was recorded from June 1 to August 31, 1987 at Abbey Road Studios in London.
Background Show Boat was first staged on 15 November 1927 at an out-of-town tryout at the National Theatre in Washington, D.C.. In accordance with normal practice, the creators of the show made several changes to it before its Broadway premiere at the Ziegfeld Theatre six weeks later. The Pantry scene (Act 1, Scene 2) and the Waterfront saloon scene (Act 1, Scene 3) were shortened, "Mis'ry's comin' aroun'", "I would like to play a lover's part" and "It's getting hotter in the north" were discarded, and "I might fall back on you", "Why do I love you?" and "Hey, feller!" were added.Kern, Jerome: Show Boat, with Karla Burns, Jerry Hadley, Bruce Hubbard, Frederica von Stade, Teresa Stratas, the Ambrosian Chorus and the London Sinfonietta, conducted by John McGlinn, EMI Records CD, CDRIVER-1, 1988
The performing score that John McGlinn constructed for his album is a conflation of Jerome Kern's Washington and New York versions, and more comprehensive than either. The Pantry and Waterfront saloon scenes are recorded in their abbreviated versions, but the three numbers deleted before the show's Broadway premiere are reinstated, and the three new numbers composed for New York are included too. Nearly all of the dialogue for which Kern composed underscoring is present as well. An hour-long appendix presents further material. McGlinn provides the original, longer versions of the Pantry and Waterfront saloon scenes; "Kim's imitations", a number written for the first Kim, Norma Terris, when she declined to sing "It's getting hotter in the north" on the grounds that it was "lousy jazz"; "Dance away the night", a number written for the show's first London staging in 1928; "Gallivantin' aroun'", "I have the room above her" and "Ah still suits me", numbers composed for Universal's 1936 Show Boat movie; "Nobody else but me", the last song that Kern wrote, composed for a revival of the show in 1946; and four numbers that were dropped in rehearsal, "Yes, ma'am", "A pack of cards", "The Creole love song" and "Out there in an orchard". A fifth number excised before the Washington tryout, the Trocadero opening chorus, is included in the main body of the album.
The three songs from the 1936 film are heard with orchestrations that Larry Moore transcribed from its soundtrack. The orchestrations for the five numbers discarded during rehearsal were composed by Russell Warner. The remaining orchestrations are all the original versions crafted by Robert Russell Bennett. Thought lost for decades, they were found just a few years before the album was made: Bennett and the musical theatre historian Miles Kreuger unearthed one batch in 1978 in the Rodgers and Hammerstein's Music Library's Queens warehouse on West 52nd Street, and a further cache was found in 1982 in Warner Brothers' music archive in their warehouse in Secaucus, New Jersey. The vocal score of "A pack of cards" was recovered even more serendipitously: the only copy of it known to have survived turned up amongst a sheaf of old sheet music in a second-hand book store in Sacramento, California.
The making of the album was beset by several difficulties. While the estates of Kern and Edna Ferber were enthusiastic about the project, Oscar Hammerstein's son William thought it fundamentally misconceived, believing that the alterations that had been made to the show in its tryout phase had been done with good reason and ought not to be reversed. Moreover, Warner Brothers and the Kern estate spent five years wrangling over who owned the copyright of the hundreds of pages of Kern's manuscripts that had been disinterred in Secaucus. The Secaucus material that McGlinn needed for his album did not become available to him until three days before he recorded it, and then only because Beverly Sills, operatic eminence and a director of Warner Communications, prevailed upon the company to sell McGlinn and EMI the scores that they wanted for a sum in five figures. (The cost of making the entire album exceeded half a million dollars.)
A further problem arose from Hammerstein's lyrics. The very first word uttered in the musical is "Niggers". It had long been customary to censor this, but McGlinn did not want to subject Hammerstein's text to bowdlerization. When the black artists whom he had recruited from the Glyndebourne Festival's production of Porgy and Bess to form Show Boats Black Chorus realized what they were going to have to sing, they resigned from the project in protest, and Willard White, McGlinn's preferred Joe, decided to go with them. McGlinn replaced White with Bruce Hubbard, also hired from Glyndebourne, after the baritone had spent a day conferring with Eartha Kitt and other friends about whether he should accept McGlinn's invitation. The Black Chorus's music was taken over by members of the Ambrosian Singers who had already been contracted to supply the album's other choral requirements.
Edward Seckerson interviewed John McGlinn about the making of the album for a feature article published in Gramophone in November 1988.Seckerson, Edward: Gramophone, November 1988, pp. 743-744 Christopher Swann shot extensive footage of the making of the album for a Granada Television documentary, The Show Boat Story, which has become available to view online.Archived at Ghostarchive and the Wayback Machine:
Recording The album was digitally recorded in June, July and August 1987 in Studio No. 1, Abbey Road Studios, London.
Cover art The covers of the LP, cassette and CD versions of the album all use an image adapted from the dust-jacket designed by René Clarke for the first edition of the Edna Ferber novel upon which the musical is based, Show Boat, published by Doubleday, Page & Company in 1926.
Critical reception Reviews
Andrew Lamb reviewed the album on CD in Gramophone in November 1988. "Never", he wrote, "... have I been so bowled over by a musical theatre recording as by this". Before listening to it, he had been apprehensive that it might be one of those albums on which a Broadway score was mistreated by a gang of gatecrashers from the world of opera. In the event, his fears had proved needless.Lamb, Andrew: Gramophone, November 1988, p. 873
Innumerable artists, among them some of the most eminent, had sung "Bill", "Ol' man river", "Make believe" and "Can't help lovin' dat man", but none that Lamb had ever heard had presented these numbers with the "beauty and style" bestowed upon them by the singers chosen by John McGlinn. "The love duets between [Frederica] von Stade and Jerry Hadley", he wrote, were "quite stunningly beautiful, and Bruce Hubbard's firm, honeyed baritone has absolutely nothing to fear from the inevitable comparisons with Paul Robeson".
In their secondary roles, Karla Burns (as Queenie), David Garrison (as Frank), Robert Nichols (as Cap'n Andy) and Paige O'Hara (as Ellie) were all "superb" too. This was not to say that every soloist was entirely perfect in every respect. Teresa Stratas, while "ravishing" in "Can't help lovin' dat man", occasionally came across as "a shade too self-conscious", and Nancy Kulp brought back memories of Dustin Hoffman in Tootsie.
There was no doubt that the Ambrosian Chorus had relished their "rousing" contributions, and the London Sinfonietta were positively riotous in the jazzy music that Kern wrote for Kim's scene in Act 3. But neither they nor any of the album's famous soloists deserved as much credit for the album's success as its conductor. John McGlinn's use of Robert Russell Bennett's original orchestrations made his recording very different from any previous version of Show Boat. This was plain from the very first bars of the overture: a tuba sounded "a note of dark foreboding" before a cheery banjo led the way to the orchestra's enthusiastic introduction to "Why do I love you?". (As well as his work on the podium, McGlinn put in a cameo appearance as Magnolia's rehearsal pianist in Act 2.)
The album's historical authenticity was not the only thing that set it apart from its predecessors. It was also encyclopedically comprehensive. "Mis'ry's comin' aroun'" was just one of several excellent pieces heard on McGlinn's discs that had been excised from the score of Show Boat almost before Kern's ink had had time to dry. An appendix included every note that a Kern devotee could desire, except for "How'd you like to spoon with me?", a number added for a production in London in 1928. McGlinn had also recorded lengthy passages of underscored dialogue, and it was the magnificence of these, ironically, that laid him open to accusations of an error of judgement. There were places - Act 1, Scene 3 for example - where dialogue was wholly absent. "By all means abridge the linking dialogue", Lamb wrote, "but to include the dialogue and underscoring complete in some scenes and not at all in others seems to me to distort the scale and balance of the piece". It might have been wiser to buy room for the missing dialogue by pruning the appendix a little. Two of its items - found in manuscript in a second-hand bookshop - hardly sounded as though they had anything to do with the Cotton Blossom at all.
All in all, though, the album was an "inspired", "quite irresistible achievement". What Solti's Decca Ring cycle had been to the history of opera, McGlinn's Show Boat was to the history of American musical theatre.
Eric Salzman reviewed the album on CD in Stereo Review in December 1988. "John McGlinn", he wrote, "is a man on a mission: to restore the lost glories of the great old American musical". His Show Boat was the most ambitious project that he had undertaken to date. Never before had a musical been reconstructed so meticulously. The original score, numbers that were dropped and new numbers composed for the stage or the screen were all present and correct.Salzman, Eric: Stereo Review, December 1988, p. 138
Robert Russell Bennett's 1927 orchestrations had been retrieved from the cobwebbed recesses of a warehouse in Secaucus. The sombre overture had been rescued from oblivion. Listeners could enjoy several wonderful old dance tunes and some liberally underscored dialogue (unbowdlerized. even at its most offensive).
Show Boat itself. alas, was not as great a work as some of its apologists claimed. Its source, Edna Ferber's novel, was not "a deathless work of art ('potboiler' might be closer to the mark)". Oscar Hammerstein II's text was spoiled by a ramshackle plot and a good deal of sentimentality. Despite moments of seriousness such as "Ol' man river", it was concerned less with social history or psychology than with the hackneyed trope of "what show-biz folks are like behind the scenes." Kern's frequent repetition of his catchiest melodies was an instance of a composer flogging his best tunes to death, not of one engaged in an architecture of Wagnerian leitmotivs. Kern and Hammerstein had crafted their magnum opus at a time when Puccini was in his grave, and Berg, Eugene O'Neill. Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill were already famous. Show Boat was already old-fashioned when it was premiered, and it would be a mistake to claim more for it than "a certain antique charm".